Art factories in the snow

The print studio is the hangar on the left and the tower was used to imprison peasant farmers who didn't pay enough tax.

This week travels bring me to a wintery (-12C) Breugelish
Hildersheim in the middle of Germany to meet up Charles Esche and
his team from the Van Abbe Museum and Prof. Thomas Lange of the
University to discuss 1848, the usage of art, agriculture, the
Zombie of modernism, cluelessness and edutainment (that word has,
worryingly no spell check alert), among other things we are
plotting to crowbar into an exhibition to change the world, or at
least change how we see it .

The art school here is like the Mercedes version of Lawson
Park’s Vauxhall Chevette. The arts school is built around a
gargantuan 13th century mega farm-cum-fortress,
surrounded by the most fertile soil in Germany. It’s very notable
as you travel through this country by train that, in contrast to
the UK, this is a land dedicated to productivity. Trackside in
England reveals and a parade of retail hanger parks, malls,
industrial wastelands, leisurelands and factories converted to
go-kart tracks; a country given over to consumption. In Germany
everyone seems to be at work, factory chimneys have smoke coming
from them, the countryside is heavily farmed, not set aside and an
engineering aesthetic pervades all, even at the Choco Leibniz
factory.

Back at the art school we go to the student cafeteria which
serves homemade café und kuchen. In fact it trumps pretty much any
restaurant the Lake District has to offer and I gaze down at my 90
degree slice of subsidised patisserie and remember less fondly the
Ginsters and scalding milky tea of the Goldsmiths’ refectory. But
this is interrupted by a request from an art history student who is
doing her thesis, startlingly, on Grizedale Arts and has heard that
I am in town. “Are you sure?” I say. Apparently this website is
read avidly in Europe, so we’d better get our act together. This is
subsequently confirmed by Grizedale alumni and current Hildersheim
artist professor Antje Schiffers who complains that we need to
maintain the joke count on the site. Although, she says, we might
be doing that but just not in a way she finds funny.